“They aren’t the words I would have chosen myself-I don’t know what words would be, exactly-but they’ll do. The point is, if you leave the Whitestone, I can’t absolutely guarantee I could get you back in, especially on short notice. There are always new girls here at D and S, as you know very well, and they have to be my first priority.”
“Of course. I understand that.”
“I’d do what I could, naturally, but-”
“If the job Mr Lefferts offered me doesn’t pan out, I’ll look for work waitressing,” Rosie said quietly.
“My back is much better now, and I think I could do it. Thanks to Dawn, I can probably get a late-shift job in a Seven-Eleven or a Piggly-Wiggly, if it comes to that.” Dawn was Dawn Verecker, who gave rudimentary clerking lessons on a cash register that was kept in one of the back rooms. Rosie had been an attentive student. Anna was still looking at Rosie keenly.
“But you don’t think it will come to that, do you?”
“No.” She directed another glance down at her picture.
“I think it will work out. In the meantime, I owe you so much…”
“You know what to do about that, don’t you?”
“Pass it on.” Anna nodded.
“That’s right. If you should see a version of yourself walking down the street someday-a woman who looks lost and afraid of her own shadow-just pass it on.”
“Can I ask you something, Anna?”
“Anything at all.”
“You said your parents founded Daughters and Sisters. Why? And why do you carry it on? Or pass it on, if you like that better?” Anna opened one of her desk drawers, rummaged, and brought out a thick paperback book. She tossed it across the desk to Rosie, who picked it up, stared at it, and experienced a moment of recall so vivid it was like one of the flashbacks combat veterans sometimes suffered. In that instant she did not just remember the wetness on the insides of her thighs, a sensation like small, sinister kisses, but seemed to re-experience it. She could see Norman’s shadow as he stood in the kitchen, talking on the phone. She could see his shadow-fingers pulling restlessly at a shadow-cord. She could hear him telling the person on the other end that of course it was an emergency, his wife was pregnant. And then she saw him come back into the room and start picking up the pieces of the paperback he had torn out of her hands before beginning to hit her. The same redhead was on the cover of the book Anna had tossed her. This time she was dressed in a ballgown and caught up in the arms of a handsome gypsy who had flashing eyes and-apparently-a pair of rolled-up socks in the front of his breeches. This is the trouble, Norman had said. How many times have I told you how I feel about crap like this?
“Rose?” It was Anna, sounding concerned. She also sounded very far away, like the voices you sometimes heard in dreams.
“Rose, are you all right?” She looked up from the book (Misery’s Lover, the title proclaimed in that same red foil, and, below it, Paul Sheldon’s Most Torrid Novel!) and forced a smile.
“Yes, I’m fine. This looks hot.”
“Bodice-rippers are one of my secret vices,” Anna said.
“Better than chocolate because they don’t make you fat and the men in them are better than real men because they don’t call you at four in the morning, drunk and whining for a second chance. But they’re trash, and do you know why?”
Rosie shook her head.
“Because the whole round world is explained in them. There are reasons for everything. They may be as farfetched as the stories in the supermarket tabloids and they may run counter to everything a halfway intelligent person understands about how people behave in real life, but they’re there, by God. In a book like Misery’s Lover, Anna Stevenson would undoubtedly run Daughters and Sisters because she had been an abused woman herself… or because her mother had been. But I was never abused, and so far as I know, my mother never was, either. I was often ignored by my husband-we’ve been divorced for twenty years, in case Pam or Gert hasn’t told you-but never abused. In life, Rosie, people sometimes do things, both bad and good, just-because. Do you believe that?” Rosie nodded her head slowly. She was thinking of all the times Norman had hit her, hurt her, made her cry… and then one night, for no reason at all, he might bring her half a dozen roses and take her out to dinner. If she asked why, what the occasion was, he usually just shrugged and said he “felt like treating her.” Just-because, in other words. Mommy, why do I have to go to bed at eight even in the summertime, when the sky is still light outside? Just-because. Daddy, why did grandpa have to die? Just-because. Norman undoubtedly thought these occasional treats and whirlwind dates made up for a lot, that they must offset what he probably thought of as his “bad temper.” He would never know (and never understand even if she told him) that they terrified her even more than his anger and his bouts of rage. Those, at least, she knew how to deal with.
“I hate the idea that everything we do gets done because of the things people have done to us,” Anna said moodily.
“It takes everything out of our hands, it doesn’t account in the least for the occasional saints and devils we glimpse among us, and most important of all, it doesn’t ring true to my heart. It’s good in books like Paul Sheldon’s, though. It’s comforting. Lets you believe, at least for a little while, that God is sane and nothing bad will happen to the people that you like in the story. May I have my book back? I’m going to finish it tonight. With lots of hot tea. Gallons.” Rosie smiled, and Anna smiled back.
“You’ll come for the picnic, won’t you, Rosie? It’s going to be at Ettinger’s Pier. We’ll need all the help we can get. We always do.”
“Oh, you bet,” Rosie said.
“Unless Mr Lefferts decides I’m a prodigy and wants me to work on Saturdays, that is.”
“I doubt that.” Anna got up and came around the desk; Rosie also stood. And now that their talk was almost over, the most elementary question of all occurred to her.
“When can I move in, Anna?”
“Tomorrow, if you want.” Anna bent and picked up the picture. She looked thoughtfully at the words charcoaled on the backing, then turned it around.
“You said it was odd,” Rosie said.
“Why?” Anna tapped the glass fronting with one nail.
“Because the woman is at the center, and yet her back is turned. That seems an extremely peculiar approach to this sort of painting, which has been otherwise quite conventionally executed.” Now she glanced over at Rosie, and when she went on, her tone was a bit apologetic.
“The building at the bottom of the hill is out of perspective, by the way.”
“Yes. The man who sold me the picture mentioned that. Mr LefFerts said it was probably done on purpose. Or some of the elements would be lost.”
“I suppose that’s true.” She looked at it for several moments longer.
“It does have something, doesn’t it? A fraught quality.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.” Anna laughed.
“Neither do I… except that there’s something about it that makes me think of my romance novels. Strong men, lusty women, gushing hormones. Fraught’s the only word I can think of that comes close to describing what I mean. A calm-before-the-storm thing. Probably it’s just the sky.” She turned the frame around again and restudied the words charcoaled on the backing.
“Is this what caught your eye to start with? Your own name?”
“Nope,” Rosie said, “by the time I saw Rose Madder on the back, I already knew I wanted the painting.” She smiled.
“It was just a coincidence, I guess-the kind that isn’t allowed in the romance novels you like.”
“I see.” But Anna didn’t look as if she did, quite. She ran the ball of her thumb across the printed letters. They smudged easily.
“Yes,” Rose said. Suddenly, for no reason at all, she felt very uneasy. It was as if, somewhere off in that other timezone where evening had already begun, a man was thinking of her.